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Kudzu, 10/27/04

All right, Kudzu, I went out on a limb for you. I said that I sometimes find you funny, something no other right-thinking comics commentator would do. I even said that I particularly like the Church League strips. And this, this is how you repay me?

Here’s the thing: the Church League is funny because no one else in America, to my knowledge, is doing jokes about differing religions, and because it’s funny to imagine the fairly bland Baptists led by Will B. Dunn playing softball against Buddhist monks or whatever. See, when you create a running gag around some structure, you can’t just jettison that structure if you want to make a joke about, say, reality show rejects (who, for the record, DO NOT THEMSELVES CONSTITUTE A RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATION).

At least when I see the parakeet, I know in advance that it’s not going to be funny. Try to keep things orderly here.

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Mother Goose and Grimm, 10/26/04

OK, so why does recycling human corpses outrage me, but marrying the taxidermied head of a member of your species who’s been killed for sport make me laugh? I guess I’m just fickle when it comes to dark humor. It’s just wrong at so many levels that I can’t resist it. I particularly like the fact that it’s at the Elk’s Club. Ha! Get it? It’s like the Elk’s Club that exists in the real world, only it’s for, like, actual elks!

Ooog. To quote The Simpsons: “Are you being sarcastic?” “Aw, I don’t even know anymore!”

The other thing that I like here is that Ed is grinning kind of maniacally, while his wife (quite understandably) looks miserable, and the other guys at the club look … uncomfortable. Not the way you’d look if, say, one of your acquaintances presented you with a stuffed and mounted severed head and demanded that you treat it as his wife, but rather as if Ed has committed some social faux pas that they don’t really want to call him on but that they aren’t really happy about either. It must be tough being an elk.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/25/04

OK, I can’t hold back any longer. Mrs. Hendershot is the villain in the current Rex Morgan story line, and I just love her hair. Is it really her hair? Is it a wig? Who cares? It’s so … interesting! I like how it seems to be one solid mass at the crown of her head, and then has precisely parallel lines mapped onto the curve of her skull further down, then ends in a perfect line that almost cups in a bit. Rex Morgan’s artists love interestingly stylized hair (just look at Heather’s two little droopy devil horns) but Mrs. H’s freaky ‘do just takes the cake. It makes her head look all the weirder perched at the end of her unnaturally thin neck.

I mean, do you think kids call her “Kremlin Head” behind her back? Because … well, I mean … her hair looks kind of like … those tower things on Russian churches. You know what I’m talking about. Those things.

Heh. “Kremlin Head.” That’s funny.

All right, that’s all I have to say about that.

Some grim fare in the soap opera strips these days. Margo’s tied up in the trunk of a car in Apartment 3-G, some poor college kid’s in the hospital from bad meth in Mary Worth, and now we’ve got a mean old lady whose crusty exterior is just a cover for a hateful, unhinged, child-abusing interior. She may be evil, but seeing this skinny elderly woman hauled off in shackles — as we almost certainly will — is going to be a somewhat unpleasant image for the funny papers.